How the legalization of assisted dying is changing our lives.
Over the past five years, medical aid-in-dying (also known as assisted
suicide) has expanded rapidly in the United States and is now legally
available to one in five Americans. This growing social and political
movement heralds the possibility of a new era of choice in dying. Yet
very little is publicly known about how medical aid-in-dying laws affect
ordinary citizens once they are put into practice. Sociological studies
of new health policies have repeatedly demonstrated that the realities
often fall short of advocacy visions, raising questions about how much
choice and control aid-in-dying actually affords.
Scripting Death chronicles two years of ethnographic research
documenting the implementation of Vermont's 2013 Patient Choice and
Control at End of Life Act. Author Mara Buchbinder weaves together
stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers,
activists, and legislators to illustrate how they navigate aid-in-dying
as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization. Scripting
Death explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to
pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the "right to die" is very
different from ensuring access to this life-ending procedure. This
unprecedented, in-depth account uses the case of assisted death as an
entry point into ongoing cultural conversations about the changing
landscape of death and dying in the United States.
